How's the City Spending the Tax Hike, Pt. 2?

We're getting closer and closer to City Manager Mary Suhm's proposed FY2011-'12 budget, which she plans to give to council members in a couple of weeks before they go on summer vacation. And, sure, she still needs to find $60 mil in cuts, give or take, before the thing's balanced. But one thing's looking more and more fer-sure: No tax hike this year. Pinky swear.

That's because no one -- not the council, not the two mayoral candidates, no one -- wants a redux of last year, when eight council members got together to help pass that tax hike that put 41,443,554 additional dollars into the city's coffers. And wouldn't you like to know where they've gone so far.

Back in February, you may recall, we took a look at first-quarter figures that revealed $5,668,170 had been spent on parks mowing, graffiti abatement, keeping rec centers open, re-striping streets and doing all the maintenance that TxDOT abandoned to the city.

I just went over to the city's website to find something unrelated and noticed the second-quarter figures are now posted at the top. To date, the city has spent $15,051,614 total, with most of that going toward street maintenance ($3,658,114), right-of-way maintenance ($1,746,613), cultural programs ($1,537,808), library staffing ($839,864) and Traffic Safety and Congestion Management ($483,944), which involves "the prompt resolution
to approximately 3,500 projects to improve safety and reduce congestion using signs, signals and markings."

And speaking of Complete(ly shitty) Streets, you may be interested in drilling down into the street services expenses spreadsheet, which shows you the streets that have been rehabbed ... and those scheduled for a FY2011 redo. Just click every "+" you see on that sucker. Lots of work left to do. Lots.